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Liberals must vote NDP to protect Ontario’s progressive legacy

By Dan RathOpinion

Mon., June 4, 2018

Now is the time for all good Liberals to come to the aid of the party.

The New Democratic Party.

Ontario Progressive Conservative Leader Doug Ford, left, and Ontario NDP Leader Andrea Horwath shake hands at the end of the third and final televised debate of the provincial election campaign in Toronto on May 27. (Frank Gunn / THE CANADIAN PRESS)

For lifelong Liberals, it’s tough to say those words. My most rewarding time as a political adviser was spent working with the Peterson and Chrétien Liberals in elections and in government, to advance Liberal values and deliver progressive change as only our party could.

But the situation Ontario faces days before the June 7 provincial election is unequivocally not business as usual.

Liberals and other centre-left Ontarians need to get their heads around what’s at stake on Thursday. This is no less than an existential moment for Ontario’s progressive legacy.

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Doug Ford and the Tories have in their sights the very essence of the province we’ve created through more than 40 years of progressive government — including the last few years of Bill Davis’s PC reign in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and excluding that nasty far-right business with Mike Harris and Ernie Eves from 1995-2003.

Liberals and other progressive Ontarians be warned: Doug Ford will make Mike Harris look like Bill Davis. The barbarians are truly at the gate, eager to hack revenues through tax cuts, then slash programs because there’s no money to pay for them — a game plan straight out of the Republican playbook.

This election is about protecting and preserving the progressive achievements and securing the advances in social justice and Liberal values that generations of small “l” and large “L” liberals have fought for.

These gains have benefited generations of Ontarians in ways we have come to take for granted because they are so deeply ingrained in the way we are in this province.

They are the legacy of red Tories like Roy McMurtry, the attorney general who helped patriate the Constitution and create the Charter of Rights and Freedoms; Liberals like Murray Elston, the health minister who led the fight to end extra billing by Ontario doctors; Ian Scott, who channelled the defining accord of Confederation as he led the extension of funding to Catholic secondary schools pledged by Davis; Dalton McGuinty, who brought the party out of the wilderness in 2003 and back to majority government; Gerard Kennedy, who forged long-term labour peace with Ontario teachers; Charles Sousa, who has crafted budgets of exquisite political balance and fairness; and, yes, Kathleen Wynne, who has led the most activist of all Ontario governments and served as a true champion of social justice.

Liberals, listen up — if Doug Ford wins, this all goes into the shredder.

The urgency of this situation calls for decisive and purposive action by Liberal voters. But in her tearful mea culpa Saturday, Wynne got it dead wrong. The need is for strategic voting but not, as Wynne suggested, for Liberal candidates in hopes of producing a minority government.

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If the Liberal vote is to swell sufficiently to elect the 12-15 Liberal members needed to result in a minority legislature, those votes will come almost exclusively at the expense of the NDP, who are neck-and-neck with the Tories.

Only soft New Democrats, particularly those who have already switched from the Liberals to the NDP, are potential NDP-Liberal switchers at this late stage in the game. Potential PC-Liberal switchers simply do not exist in the requisite number to fulfil Wynne’s goal.

That means progressive voters who respond to Wynne’s last-ditch plea and vote Liberal will deliver a catastrophic unintended consequence: they will decrease the NDP vote yield enough to ensure a PC victory — probably with a majority. The notorious efficiency of the PC vote is the danger. With their broadly distributed, non-clustered support in both urban and rural ridings, the PCs are poised to win far more seats than the NDP with roughly the same number of votes.

Rather than providing the moderating influence of a minority government with the Liberals holding the balance of power, chipping away at the NDP vote will merely increase the likelihood of Doug Ford becoming premier — and each Liberal vote retrieved from the NDP improves the chances Ford will command a majority.

At best, Wynne’s plea is a thinly veiled attempt at triage in hopes of clinging to official party status and ensuring the election of the next generation of Liberals, who will lead and rebuild the party in her wake.

Ontario NDP Leader Andrea Horwath and Liberal Leader Kathleen Wynne are criticizing Doug Ford’s Tories for not releasing a full platform ahead of June’s provincial election. The leaders spoke to reporters after a debate on May 27. (The Canadian Press)

At worst, it’s a misguided and tragic last stab at keeping her party relevant — and if it works, it will go down as the penultimate strategic gaffe in the least competently conceived and managed provincial Liberal campaign since 1990.

Key progressive actors in Ontario should take it upon themselves to counter Wynne’s advice. They should join The Star in recognizing the true nature of the Ford PC threat to Ontario’s progressive legacy and traditions, and endorse the Horwath NDP to help credibly validate the inclinations of Liberal-NDP switchers and keep them from straying back to the doomed Liberal cause.

Stakeholder and activist groups — unions, environmentalists, health advocates, educators — should cease playing all sides and consolidate their support around the NDP, to protect the public interests in which they deeply believe.

Ontario, as we know it today, depends on it.

Dan Rath was co-author of Not Without Cause: David Peterson’s Fall from Grace.

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